adjective

• 1Relating to the form or structure of things.

  ‘the purely morphological fact that with a little dam one could hold back a lot of water’

  More example sentences

  • ‘The elegant installation, which juxtaposed sculptures and drawings, demonstrated the morphological development of Bontecou's ideas.’
  • ‘It is more typical, however, to encounter a sample of artifacts exhibiting morphological characteristics along a continuum that are not easily sorted by discrete variables.’
  • ‘Petridis covers in some detail Olbrechts's morphological approach to the study of art, as developed in his Congo art book.’
  • ‘The sculptural solidity of the forms, the sharply creased drapery folds, and morphological details of hair, eyes and extremities are all characteristic of the youthful Bronzino.’
  • ‘Picasso's pots, pitchers, and platters are exuberantly modern, not only in their late Surrealist morphological fluidity, but also in their rapport with the Duchampian readymade.’
  • ‘Here, he reintroduces wacky, quasi-surrealist characters, like those in his first New York exhibitions, to activate the colorful geometry in a tumbling, morphological mix.’
  • ‘12th- and 13th-century churches in the diocese of Paris imitate many of the formal and morphological features of Notre-Dame.’
  • ‘Based on obvious morphological differences and wear analyses conducted in the Midwest, blade tools were clearly used for a wide variety of tasks, including cutting, shredding, and whittling.’
  • ‘Climatic, hydrological, and geological conditions in the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica are analogous in many ways to those on Mars, and many ice-related features may have direct morphologic and compositional counterparts on Mars.’
  • ‘This is one of the pre-requisites to the formation of crystals with well-developed faces and high degrees of morphologic perfection.’

  1. 1.1Relating to the branch of biology that deals with the form of living organisms, and with relationships between their structures.
     ‘studies of genetic variation of morphological traits in mammals’
     More example sentences

     • ‘the geraniums have a number of unusual morphological adaptations’
     • ‘The two species show only minimal morphological differentiation, suggesting very recent diversification.’
     • ‘A morphological or physiological trait may appear multiple times in evolution.’
     • ‘The morphological variability within the sheathed bacteria is high.’
     • ‘The neuroendocrine granular cells did not show the typical morphologic features of insulin granules.’
     • ‘Differential counts were performed on 200 cells using standard morphologic criteria.’
  2. 1.2Linguistics Relating to the forms of words, in particular inflected forms.
     ‘the language's phonological, morphological and syntactic structure’
     More example sentences

     • ‘morphological and syntactic similarities between languages’
     • ‘In the case of morphological marking, a verbal affix (in its broadest sense) is attached to the predicate or predicate complex.’
     • ‘Such a feature (phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, lexical, or other) usually contrasts with some similar feature in adjoining areas.’
     • ‘Very frequently, words are given incorrect or unjustifiable morphological analyses.’
     • ‘Berko wanted to test children's knowledge of morphological rules.’
     • ‘The children were tested on a variety of morphological processes (past-tense formation of novel verbs, possessive forms of novel nouns, etc.)’